Will You Trust Facebook With Your E-Mail?

"It's not e-mail" emphasized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
at this morning's product launch in San Francisco, it's a "modern
messaging system." Whatever the 26-year-old wunderkind wants to call
it, e-mail is what's on everyone's mind in the tech-sphere today.
Facebook's new product,
which has been introduced to a small user base, aims to integrate
instant messages, text messages and, yes, e-mail all into one place. The
service will create a "conversation history" so that however you
communicate with someone (e.g. SMS, IM, e-mail), it will be easily
viewable in one place on your Facebook account. Users will receive an
@facebook.com e-mail address and a "social in-box," which filters out
spam and promotes messages from your personal friends.

The
elephant in the room is whether or not users will trust Facebook with a
service that so deeply immerses itself into individuals' daily
affairs. Here's what techies are saying about the new service:

At
the heart of it all is the “social inbox,” a place where messages -
again,not just email - are housed and filtered. Because Facebook already
knows who your “friends” are, it can filter messages that it believes
to be important to you. Everything else - not necessarily junk but maybe
a newsletter or a bank statement or something from a family member
who’s not on Facebook - goes into an “other” folder. ...

In terms of the seamless integration
that Zuckerberg and team talked about, the idea is that users should be
able to have an IM appear as an SMS or an SMS appear as an email, giving
people a way to use the communication tool they prefer without worrying
about how the recipient will see it or respond to it.

As
with most discussions of Facebook these days, it all returns to privacy
concerns and whether or not we trust the site with more and more of our
information. During the announcement, alarm bells went off when one
member of the audience asked if Facebook would be capturing information
about non-Facebook users. "Yes," answered Zuckerberg, "in some way we do
that."

...We'll have to see what happens next. Unlike
other recent social media failures, this is an integral part of
Facebook's system, so it won't be whether or not Facebook users use the
system, but how they use it.

In many ways, what Facebook is trying to do seems a lot like Google’s ill-fated Wave service:
namely, a single product that combines different forms of communication
— email, instant messaging, live chat, and so on. The benefit for
Facebook is that it already has 350 million users who are addicted (on
some level at least) to the social network’s messaging system, and many
of them are probably like the high-school students that Zuckerberg
talked to, and don’t use email. A unified inbox could give Facebook an
even tighter relationship with those users — particularly in mobile, as Om pointed out.

The
most exciting prospect is the idea of a 'social inbox', which is
basically an automatic email whitelist. Instead of being forced to
hand-create lists of 'favourite' friends that skip your spam filters,
Facebook's new messaging platform will automatically filter mail from
your Facebook friends, your friends-of-friends.